Reply #6: The context is the unpredicability of Iraq for the forseeable future. [View All]

[TayTay]

Ricks likes the fact that we are paying for security in Iraq. (I find that troubling.) We pay thousands of Sunni's to not fight us. That is a fact and it is one of the things that helped bring about security.

There are so many ways of talking about Iraq. We just came off a long, long political season in which we sort of drew up sides and were locked into talking about Iraq based on our sides point of view. That election season is finally over and that can afford a new way of looking at the situation. (We get locked into our sides during a campaign. I find that troubling as well.)

The right wing talks about the surge as if it was a wholly good thing that was entirely done by Bush and the Republicans. I have seen many a commentator on TV use "success" of the surge as a tool to bash Democrats. I don't think they see the surge for what it was or is. These commentators seem to make the point that the surge was a heroic last minute gamble on the part of Republicans to save the war and that Democrats who opposed it should apologize for opposing it.

This is hardly the case. Sen. Kerry, for example, stated in 2005 in his Georgetown speech and on talk show appearances, that he wanted a change in the strategy. He took a lot of heat from right wing critics for stating that Iraqis resented having their homes entered and foreign troops rifling through their stuff and "disrespecting" the women there. Well, that exact sentiment was the background to the surge. (John Kerry was 100% right in this.) However, in the popular press, "the surge" became only about adding 30,000 troops to Iraq. The much, much more significant thing about this time period was the change in strategy and the change in how troops would be deployed, what they would be doing and how they would interact with the Iraqi population. This was exactly what was wrong with the initial 4 years of the war.

The military changed the strategy. How many times did we hear Sen. Kerry call for just that? The central change in this time period was the top-down view that the goal was now to protect the civilian population. This meant not driving through neighborhoods in armored humvees and stopping at houses and pulling young males out and the resulting hatred and resentment that the Iraqis felt toward the occupiers. It meant dealing with the Iraqi population as human beings. Success was redefined not as the number of kills of insurgents, but as the number of Iraqi civilians protected. Isn't that what Sen. Kerry wanted? (It is insulting to have rw commentators like Scarborough insist that Democrats apologize for opposing the surge when their opposition and actions resulted in the political pressure in this country to affect that change. We really need a break from campaign season here.)

What I liked most about this book was not any kind of rah-rah support of the war. It is how the very change that so many people sought finally, and possibly too late, came to Iraq.

It is also the very thought-provoking idea that we may be a victim of that success. We are paying for peace and are probably going to seek a variation of paying for peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Is that sustainable?